Amagansett

Five

As Hollis turned off Woods Lane, a dog darted into the road. He braked suddenly, stalling the car, and the small basket of chocolates spilled off the passenger seat on to the floor. He let them lie where they fell—already softened by the heat, the dirt clinging to them—then he restarted the engine and carried on along Highway Behind the Lots.
Abel lived in a modest cottage near the junction with Wireless Road. It was the house he had grown up in, the only house he had ever known. His father, an engineer with a New York firm, had moved with his wife and newborn son to East Hampton soon after the Great War to oversee the construction of a wireless telegraphy station on a plot just south of Cove Hollow Road.
By 1921 Henry Cole’s work was done, but East Hampton had weaved its spell on him. A keen amateur photographer, he secured a loan for a down payment on a narrow store on Main Street, and for the remainder of his life devoted himself to photographic portraiture. Abel was nineteen years old at the time of his father’s death, and it was natural that he take over the business. However, with money tight he was in no position to move out of the family home, and he had to content himself with entertaining a string of local girls on the plum-velvet Victorian couch in the shop, the one reserved for family portraits. With his dark, broken looks, his languid manner and quick wit, there was never any shortage of young women willing to test the springs with him.
His mother died quite unexpectedly of a stroke the day after the German army entered Paris. The two events were not necessarily unconnected. Sylvie Cole had spent the first eighteen years of her life in a small apartment off the Square des Batignolles in the 17th arrondissement of that city, before boarding a ship in Le Havre bound for New York.
The only son of an only son, destined never to meet his mother’s family from whom she was estranged, Abel found himself alone in the world at the age of twenty-three with an ailing business and a small shingled cottage on Highway Behind the Lots.
Set some distance back from the road, the front lawn of the house was an untended meadow of tall grasses and wild flowers, Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed susans. A narrow swathe of clipped lawn provided the only access to the house, obliging visitors to run a gauntlet of butterflies and bees in order to reach the front porch, which was fringed with self-seeded hollyhocks, well over six feet tall at this time of year.
If Hollis knew the names of the flowers it was only because Abel’s girlfriend, Lucy, had talked him through them on many occasions. Although they didn’t live together, Lucy had staked her claim to the front and back gardens—wild, unruly kingdoms which belied the thought, expertise and hard work behind them.
Lucy made a comfortable living maintaining the gardens of city people. Out of season she pruned their shrubs, cut back their perennials, planting bulbs and annuals so that their borders, pots and window boxes were ablaze with color come the summer when they took up residence once more. The summer months were her quietest time of the year. She had a team of local boys, headed by her feckless nephew, to weed and water, and mow the lawns.
Lucy must have seen Hollis park up because she appeared on the porch as he made his way towards the house. Slight, slender and effortlessly beautiful, her long dark hair tied back with a ribbon, she was wearing an apron and clutching a wooden spoon. Hollis kissed her on the cheek.
‘You look very…’ He searched for the word.
‘Yes?’
‘Norman friggin’ Rockwell!’ shouted Abel from inside the house.
Hollis laughed. It was true, she was the very picture of benign domesticity, the smiling wife in the gingham apron, pure Saturday Evening Post front cover.
Abel appeared from the house and Lucy struck him with the wooden spoon, a playful but firm blow on the arm.
‘Jesus, Lucy!’
‘Any more of that and you won’t be eating tonight.’
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ mumbled Abel, wisely backing out of range. Lucy headed inside.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Abel. ‘She insisted.’ He was referring to the fact that Lucy was wearing an apron. She was a woman of many talents; sadly, cooking wasn’t one of them. It was an inescapable truth that Lucy sought unsuccessfully to refute with recipes of ever-increasing ambition and complexity.
In her defense, the dish she’d prepared for them that evening was far better than it sounded. Tomato aspic with cloves and beef tongue was certainly a first for Hollis, and it wasn’t half bad, though there was no question it would have been far more appetizing had Lucy chosen to slice the tongue first. As it was, the pale, muscular appendage, spiked with cloves, lay suspended in its bed of rosy gelatin like some scientific curiosity preserved for posterity.
Abel was uncharacteristically restrained in his comments, even when Lucy cleared the plates and entered the house. They were eating at the table on the back terrace, the garden awash with warm evening light. Abel filled Hollis’ glass with wine.
‘You make any headway on the dead girl?’ he asked.
‘Name’s Lillian Wallace.’ From Abel’s expression, it rang no bells with him. ‘Her father’s some Wall Street whiz. I spoke to him earlier, broke the news. The family’s driving up tonight. There’s a formal identification of the body set for noon tomorrow.’
He didn’t tell Abel that he planned to be at the morgue a good hour earlier to scrutinize the results of Dr Hobbs’ autopsy before the body was released to the custody of the family.
‘Speaking of corpses,’ said Abel, reaching for his pack of cigarettes. ‘Any news from Lydia?’
‘She called a couple of nights back.’
‘Collect?’
Abel had never liked Hollis’ wife, a fact he had half-heartedly attempted to disguise while she’d been around. Now that she was gone, he felt no such compunction.
‘Still with that stoop-shouldered f*cker, is she?’
‘Seems so.’
‘What did she want?’
‘A divorce.’
Abel looked at Hollis long and hard, weighing the news. ‘What did you say?’
‘What could I say?’
‘Knowing you—“Come back, dear, all is forgiven.”’
‘I said yes.’
‘You didn’t?’
Hollis nodded.
‘I’m trying not to smile.’
‘I can see that.’
‘Good on you, Tom,’ beamed Abel, raising his glass in a salute. ‘To the stoop-shouldered f*cker. May he soon come to know that your loss is not his gain.’
The gentleman in question was a New Jersey artist of Scottish extraction, a competent watercolorist who had summered in East Hampton the previous year at a boarding house on Accabonac Road. Hollis had no idea how Lydia had come to meet Joe McBride. He didn’t wish to know. It pained him to think of the numerous liaisons the pair had doubtless contrived behind his back; and it still puzzled him that he hadn’t read the signs, the clues, he of all people. Hindsight offered no illumination. Even casting his mind back to that time, he could recall nothing out of the ordinary. Had she taken special care over her appearance? Had she been more remote or badtempered with him than usual? Had she shown any undue aversion to sex? Probably, but nothing he could remember. It had simply happened, without his awareness, almost in his very presence.
This was the saddest indictment of their relationship, the unspoken pact of mutual indifference they had allowed themselves to sign up to. He had been immune to her, even as her heart soared. Could he really blame her for leaving?
One small part of himself clung to the notion that ultimate responsibility lay with Lydia, that things would have been different if she had only supported him in his hour of need, rather than chiding him for destroying his career, and their lives with it, on a matter of principle.
In his heart, however, he knew it was he who had betrayed their childhood dream, hatched in the gloomy passageways of the fourflight walk-up tenement where their families lived, vowing to each other that life would be better for them—no bedbugs, no roaches, no shared hall toilet stinking of CN disinfectant, no El trains hammering past outside, drowning out their whispers, the flat, dead eyes of the passengers staring in on their wretched lives. And so it had proved, their first halting steps on the ladder of selfbetterment against the downdraft of the Depression years, ever upwards, until he had lost his footing, dragging her with him into the void.
At the age of twenty-nine, way before his time, Hollis had already faced the grinning demon all men must confront in their lives, the one who mocks you with the certain knowledge that you’ve climbed as high as you’re ever going to, that you’ve scaled the peak, that from here the only way is down.
They were doomed even before they moved out to Long Island, he knew that now. Life in East Hampton—the village, its people, the cloying parochialism—became just another rod to beat him with. Lydia waxed sentimental about the city they had been forced to leave behind them, the same city she had spent the past twenty years of her life lambasting. She dreamed of Manhattan stores she had never shown any inclination to visit when they lived there: Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller. She subscribed to the New York Sunday Times, scouring its innumerable sections. Plaintively, she read aloud the reviews of Broadway plays as if theater were her greatest passion, and yet she showed no desire to attend the capable productions of the local Guild Hall Players.
Hollis had always tried to keep a wall between his work and his home life, to spare Lydia the daily round of depravity he witnessed as a detective. Since moving to East Hampton, he had maintained this wall, though for different reasons—to shield her from the banality of his work, to deny her the tools of further castigation.
As for himself, he had simply become inured to the desperate drudgery. He no longer bothered to return the smiles and waves while out on patrol. When called on to deal with some minor misdemeanor—the theft of a few hay bales or a family feud come to blows—he struggled to muster any concern, professional or otherwise, for the victims. The daily crowings and criticisms from Chief Milligan washed over him where once they had made his blood boil with impotent anger. He became an observer of a world he no longer inhabited although he moved through it: a muted world, clouded, like squinting at a painting.
That had all changed as of today when he saw the earring backstud lying in the sand beside the head of Lillian Wallace. A moment of clarity, a detail, the world unexpectedly thrown into sharp relief. The Devil is in the Details—the note pinned to the wall above his desk in the detective division task room.
‘Have you heard of a fellow called Labarde?’ he asked. ‘Conrad Labarde. He’s a fisherman, in Amagansett.’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘He was the one pulled the girl from the sea.’
‘Sure, I know him, to nod at. We crossed in high school. He got yanked out like most of the fishing kids. We didn’t mix much, the East Hampton boys and the ‘Gansetters, you know—a rivalry thing. I remember him, though.’
‘Carries a limp.’
‘A limp?’
‘Left leg.’
Abel shrugged. ‘Not back then. Hell of a ball player, if I remember right. Could be he picked it up in the war.’
‘He’s a veteran?’
‘Not all of us managed to dodge the draft,’ said Abel with a wry smile. He knew this was unfair, that Hollis’ job as a detective had excluded him from military call-up.
‘We all passed through Camp Upton about the same time. I don’t know where he ended up. Come to think of it, maybe he never saw action. He didn’t show at the Memorial Day parade, this year or last.’ Abel stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Why all the questions?’
‘No reason,’ said Hollis.
In truth, the tall Basque with the unsettling gaze had been preying on his mind all day. In the first place, he had also picked up on the woman’s earrings—that was impressive—and then when Hollis feigned uncertainty of their significance he had simply smiled enigmatically, seeing through the front.
How had the fellow got his measure so quickly? And his parting words, the studied weight of the delivery—‘See you around, Deputy.’ They had never met before, why should they ever see each other again? If it was a message, it was one that Hollis had yet to fathom.
‘When you’re ready,’ said Abel.
‘What’s that?’
‘Come on, Tom, something’s up. I can see you thinking; shit, I can almost hear it.’
Hollis didn’t reply.
‘All I’m saying is…in your own time, if you want to talk about it.’
At that moment Lucy appeared from the house, hurrying towards the table, the oven gloves barely a match for the heat from the glass dish she was carrying. Dropping the dish on the table, she shook out her scalded fingers.
Hollis and Abel stared: patches of ocher-brown paste showing through a husk of dirty white, like snow on a muddy paddock during the spring thaw.
‘Lou, what in God’s name…?’ muttered Abel.
‘Sweet potato and marshmallow surprise,’ she replied proudly.